A UK-based cyberlaw blog by Lilian Edwards. Specialising in online privacy and security law, cybercrime, online intermediary law (including eBay and Google law), e-commerce, digital property, filesharing and whatever captures my eye:-)
Based at The Law School of Strathclyde University . From January 2011, I will be Professor of E-Governance at Strathclyde University, and my email address will be lilian.edwards@strath.ac.uk .

"We want social media companies to take steps to stop this happening.
It's on their platforms this is occurring. They must accept
responsibilty for what's happening on their platforms," said Trotter,
chair of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) communications
advisory group.
"They can't just set it up and walk away. We don't
want to be in this arena. They are ingenious people, it can't be beyond
their wit to stop these crimes, particularly those particularly serious
allegations we have heard of over the weekend."

What
exactly do we have police for, then, if not to investigate specific,
repeated and documented crimes? Giving up on policing Twitter is no more
defensible than abandoning a town like, say, Walthamstow to the criminal elements.

For a senior policeman, Mr Trotter also seems sadly ignorant of the law. Even leaving aside the issue of threat of rape as a common law crime, which might involve some difficult issues of sufficiently proving intention (though not many), the Protection Against Harassment Act 1997, especially s 4(1) makes it very clear that two attempts to "cause another to fear that violence will be used against him [sic] " form a course of conduct which is a crime. In the Perez and Creasy cases there are apparently hundreds of such threatening tweets, many retweeted or screencapped.

It is impossible to understand how police who went ahead with investigating cases which involved poorly framed jokes on Twitter can now say they do not have the money to take on genuine, vicious and entirely humorless threats of rape.
It seems much more likely that they fear they do not have the
technical ability to understand how to police the Net , or the resources, and are terrified, and also worried that having destroyed their credibility on the Net once (see below), things can only get worse.
But in that case the remedy is to acquire expertise, not to retreat to a pre
1996 position of declaring the social Internet terra incognita where
elephantine trolls roam.

The police want to offload the responsibility in its entirety - and the cost - on to Twitter. But what exactly can Twitter do, even with the much demanded "Report Abuse" button, which they are now rolling out faster than planned? It can close accounts, but the
trolls will simply open new ones, which can rarely be traced to their
predecessor, as consumer Internet access uses different IP addresses
every time, so IP blocking will merely remove some poor innocent from Twitter.

Blocking tweets with the word rape in them (or similar) will
also block millions of innocent tweets, many by the very women
embroiled in this debate. Blocking algorithms are not some magic Harry Potter like ward-spell, able to discern the evil in the hearts of men from 140 characters. Spam, for example, is relatively well blocked because it, and the bot accounts from which it comes, have certain very obvious characteristics which can be easily made into automated filters: repeated words and URLs, accounts which have arisen very recently and have no or few followers. This is not true of the very wide range of abusive tweets. Machines don't understand natural language very well, let alone legalities like intention. And even counting abuse reports is likely to be used against the very women who are currently asking for it to to be brought in to protect them. And, finally, blocking threats of violence doesn't block those men, sometimes, actually carrying them out in real life. For this reason Twitter are right to still say that :

"Twitter will investigate every report received, but if something has
gone beyond the point of a personal conflict and has turned into
credible threats, whether it be online or offline, you should contact
your local authorities as they are in the best position to assess the
threat and intervene or assist as necessary. "

FInally, the police are not the only ones at fault here. Over the last few days
much of the media has seemed determined to pin the blame on Twitter
alone - as an aside, could this be because Twitter is a danger to the
failing industry that is broadsheet journalism? It is unclear - with the
greatest respect to the women who have been through the mill in these
cases - why they ever expected Twitter to be their main conduit to
justice here . Twitter itself, even with its US free speech-oriented heritage, has never
asserted these tweets were protected or defensible speech. But for the reasons cited above it cannot do much. And it certainly cannot prosecute, caution, fine or jail.

But in the end the solution to all this is not the magic technology wand, nor, much, police crackdowns on the limitless swell of semi-anonymous trolls. It is to create a less misogynistic society where it does not occur to men, even a small minority of men, to try to silence uppity women by making vile threats to them, comforted and applauded by their bully boys supporters club . There are all kinds of issues here that need debated much more than a tweak to Twitter's reporting system: lad's mags with tits out, non reporting of rape, prevalence of violent or objectified pornographic images of women (see last post!), education, the glass ceiling, the relativing silencing of women and girls in many public meetings, in schools, on TV, as presenters on serious media if not beautiful enough, even the portrayal of Parliament itself as necessarily full of braying, rude and ill mannered men. It's not an easy problem to start to address but waiting for the technology magic bullet is not helping anyone.

NOTE: I wrote here, as someone will no doubt remind me, that the police should be careful not to stifle free speech on social media by hasty prosecutions using inappropriate laws which fail to correctly assess the norms of debate of the online world. There is no contradiction here. A tasteless but hasty one-off tweet to the world that (say) that British soldiers “should die and go to hell” is not hard to distinguish from a pattern of repeated specific and violent threats targeted at a particular woman. In the first the debate is about individual freedom of speech and norms as to w how we want discussion to be waged in public spaces, within a political context of discussion; in the second, the matter is of crime, violence, hate and fear, and in no way, in my view, having seen sample tweets re tweeted, about debate, or free speech.